Twitter Uproar Over Airport Bomb Joke

Do virtual social networks, such as Twitter, push the law of free speech too far? Or does the digital generation have a bad sense of humor? BBC News reports:

Tweeters have joined forces to support Paul Chambers, the man convicted and fined for a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport.

The Twitter community is angry that the 27-year-old accountant has failed to overturn his conviction.

A day after his appeal failed, two “hashtags” to highlight his situation remain top topics in the UK.

Free speech advocate Index on Censorship said the UK judiciary was out of step with social networks.

“The verdict demonstrates that the UK’s legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century,” said the organisation’s news editor Padraig Reidy.

There aren’t very many people that consider jokes about blowing up airports funny…even thirty years ago. The portions of the human brain that have to shut off before making that comment seemed like a good idea…enormous.

And..I’m sure this will bring out herds of drones that still haven’t worked out even the simplest parameters of free speech and the way it works in reality…versus the fiction we get pumped full of as children.

Haystack

He clearly thought he was speaking “among friends” by whom it would be taken for granted that his comment was in jest, the way people do every day when they joke about venting their frustration in various illegal or destructive ways (“If you move my chair again, I’ll kill you.”) I think people are right to resent heavy-handed security/law-enforcement organizations who arbitrarily destroy people’s lives by refusing to apply common sense. You shouldn’t have to be constantly thinking “Could this comment be overheard by law enforcement, and might they misunderstand it in a way that will get me arrested?”–that’s Stasiland.

http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

There aren’t very many people that consider jokes about blowing up airports funny…even thirty years ago. The portions of the human brain that have to shut off before making that comment seemed like a good idea…enormous.

And..I’m sure this will bring out herds of drones that still haven’t worked out even the simplest parameters of free speech and the way it works in reality…versus the fiction we get pumped full of as children.

Haystack

He clearly thought he was speaking “among friends” by whom it would be taken for granted that his comment was in jest, the way people do every day when they joke about venting their frustration in various illegal or destructive ways (“If you move my chair again, I’ll kill you.”) I think people are right to resent heavy-handed security/law-enforcement organizations who arbitrarily destroy people’s lives by refusing to apply common sense. You shouldn’t have to be constantly thinking “Could this comment be overheard by law enforcement, and might they misunderstand it in a way that will get me arrested?”–that’s Stasiland.